


The Sword of my Youth

by AellaIrene



Category: Kingsman (Movies), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Genre: Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-11
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-12-14 01:35:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11772723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AellaIrene/pseuds/AellaIrene
Summary: There are no doors that will open for Bill Haydon's sonHarry Hart becomes a Kingsman for lack of other options.





	The Sword of my Youth

There are no doors that will open for Bill Haydon’s son.

Well, no, that isn’t strictly true. Some doors will half-open for Harry Hart, though never the ones he really wants. Those are usually slammed in his face when someone, one of the cognoscenti, murmurs, “Well, you know whose son he is? No, that was his stepfather--”

He should have expected it. Certainly, his mother warned him, the summer he was fifteen, the two of them lounging at a cafe table in Capri. She would not meet his eyes, that day, paid attention to first stubbing out her old cigarette, and then lighting her new one, the neat imprint of her mouth in lipstick on the edge of her glass of campari.

“Maybe I should have told you earlier,” she said, when she had finished, and Harry was still sitting there, staring helplessly at his own glass (coke and amaretto, and he knew something was wrong when his mother didn’t wince, the way she always does when he orders it). “I’m telling you now. I don’t expect you to moderate your expectations-- you’re _my_ son, after all.”

Unfortunately, being the son of Lady Lavinia Forsythe-Allerdyce (she dropped the Hart when she dropped the husband) cuts no ice at all where it needs to. His mother went into voluntary exile after her first husband died, spent the next two decades being _the_ woman in every ex-pat community she chose to, and took Harry along behind her.

Harry doesn’t remember Bill Haydon. He was a toddler when his father died, still clinging to his mother’s skirts. His first clear memory is the bright sunny light of the first villa, the one in Corfu, and his mother standing with her hands on her hips and saying “Why I _listened_ to Larry I can’t think.” 

So, here is Harry Hart, aged twenty one, with a first class degree behind him, and no opportunities at all before him, having failed even to gain a pupillage in, of all places, Milton Keynes. (“Obviously if you wanted it, dearest,” his mother said, voice crackling over the line from Dubai, “But I couldn’t possibly have _visited_ you.”) He can fence, shoot, knows three different kinds of hand to hand (Iran during the Revolution was hardly conducive to outside excursions, and there was an ex-serviceman living in the same building, so his mother pulled back the rugs and told them to make merry and if they could contrive to destroy that clock, it had been a birthday present from an aunt she couldn’t stand), speaks three languages well and bits of four more, and is coming to the end of his money. Going cap in hand to his mother is possible, but would be intensely shameful, and so he has gone to Venice, where nothing is cheap, but at least he will be going broke in style.

Harry could, perhaps, become a gigolo. He is considering this, sat at a cafe with an aperitif (Campari, a substitute for his mother’s presence), and watching the parade of Venetian life before him (that British couple are not, in fact, boringly married but are having an affair, both of them, that woman is suffering money troubles, probably a gambling habit, that man has just been dumped by his boyfriend and is attempting to be consoled by the waiter, who is not in the mood for it, probably because _he_ is having a torrid affair with the barman, whose eyes he keeps meeting, and then abandoning), when the woman slides out of the crowd, and sits down opposite him.

Harry straightens, reflexively. She is around twenty years older than him, wearing a perfectly judged mix of Dior and Chanel, and when she raises her left hand to gesture to the waiter (only too glad to escape the man currently trying to chat him up), he can see two rings, one a sapphire flanked by diamonds, the other a plain gold wedding band.

Very few women try to have affairs whilst wearing their wedding bands.

“Can I help you?” he asks, because it is very likely she is a friend of his mother’s, and, while his mother would never ask someone to check on him, she would still listen should someone mention his name.

“Actually,” she says, “I think I can help you.” Her smile is short, but brilliant. “You can call me Kay. Ah, grazie signor. Uno calice de vino bianco, por favor? Soave. Grazie.”

The waiter goes off to fulfil the order and eyefuck the bartender while he does it, leaving the two of them alone.

“So,” Kay says, “You’re Bill Haydon’s son.”

“I am,” Harry says, carefully keeping his voice level, though he’s so fucking sick of this, of it being thrown in his face by smug bastards, as if they think that Harry’s father, dead and gone nearly twenty years, what-- taught him betrayal in the cradle? Infected him with loyalty to the Party?

“Your father had his best friend killed,” she observes, “Along with at least a hundred others, along the way. He betrayed his country in more ways than I can count in a day.”

Harry swallows. “I know.”

“And here you sit, his only son. Talented, but no one will ever trust you. Why would they? Your father attended Eton and Oxford, and married the daughter of a Marquis. You-- well, you went to Cambridge, for which I am told you can be forgiven.”

“Is there a point to this?” Harry asks, tightly, “Or do you just want to remind me of things I already know.”

Kay leans forward. “You were evacuated from Iran during the Revolution,” she says, “Or after, thanks to the Embassy. You speak French and Farsi fluently. Your Italian is acceptable. Your German requires work, and I’d rather not think for too long about your Arabic or your Greek. Your tutor at Selwyn College describes you as ‘An able young man’-- high compliment from Pongo.”

The wine comes. It gives Kay the chance to lean down to her handbag, and withdraw a card case-- silver, monogrammed with a K,, and slide a card across the table to him.

_Kingsman_ , it says, and an address on Savile Row.

“I’m offering you a chance to redeem your name,” says Kay, “I’m offering you a chance to show everyone who has ever turned their faces away from Bill Haydon’s son what they could have had, what an _unforgivable_ mistake they’ve made. You can be the man your father should have been, the man he pretended to be. All you have to do is be here,” she taps the address, “One week from today, at noon GMT.”

“What if I’m not?”

She shrugs. “Then I’ll wash my hands of you, and you’ll never see me again. Don’t bother to try and work out why I have an interest in you-- if you ever deserve to know, I’ll tell you. Just know that this is the only time you will receive this offer.”

Harry looks down at the address. He knows the name of Kingsman-- he knows men who get their suits made there, though he’s never patronised it.

“And what would I be doing it _for_?” he asks, and Kay’s smile this time is leonine.

“My dear boy. Let me tell you about Kingsman.”

 

After, when Kay has vanished, leaving the scent of her perfume and a thousand lira, enough, Harry notes, to cover both of them, he orders another drink, and thinks.

There must have been a time when his father was offered, if not this choice, another like it. Two times. Harry doesn’t know whether he was recruited, then betrayed, or whether he betrayed and ensured he was recruited. But still, there must have been at least one time when Bill Haydon-- what? Hesitated over his choice? Took careful consideration of his fate?

Harry didn’t know the man. He doesn’t know whether Haydon had qualms about any of it.

He knows that he, Harry, is not afraid of the danger implied. He remembers, quite vividly, sitting on the roof of their building in Tehran while his mother shared a bottle of Chivas Regal with one of their neighbours, and the two of them lazily debated whether that was the British Embassy that had just caught fire, remembers being evacuated in the middle of the Tehran rush hour while his mother huddled down and said, “If you see anyone we know, dearest, for heaven’s sake pretend you haven’t,” one week before the siege of the American Embassy started.

He thinks about the legacy his father left him, of his mother’s tight mouth, and the trail of men she has left behind her because she will fuck them and use them but never ever trust them, because she married a man once, and look what that got her.

That evening, back at the hotel, he calls the airport to buy a ticket to London.

 

The training is challenging, Harry won’t deny that. Kay escorts him to the dormitory, and abandons him there, to an irascible Welshman who gives his name as Myrddin, and gives them a lecture on Geoffrey of Monmouth when one of the other candidates dares to ask why.

He sees her, a few times, usually exquisitely dressed, once with a black eye coming up, once walking through the grounds, her dog at her heels, talking to Gawain. Gawain is the agent they see most, after Merlin, blond and balding, judging everything about them, and he’s hardest of all on Harry. He knows Harry’s Bill Haydon’s son. Everyone knows that, by a week in, and Harry fights all the harder to make up for that, because _fuck them all._

When he names his dog Mr Pickles, Gawain looks like he’s going to die of sheer annoyance, there and then.

After the train test, Kay takes Harry back to her place, at which point he discovers that she’s Mrs Gawain, or rather, Gawain is Mr Kay. 

Which explains a lot.

In private life, according to the pile of post in a silver salver, they are Mr and Lady Marina King, with a W1 postcode, and a wedding photo taken at St Stephen’s Chapel, in the Houses of Parliament, prominently displayed. They have a cleaner who comes in twice a week, and Gawain does the cooking, because, apparently, last time Kay tried they ended up with not only the fire brigade, but also the bomb disposal unit being called out, after they found unexploded ordnance in the back garden.

It all feels disturbingly intimate, which Harry supposes is rather the point, encouraging the illusion that he knows and trusts these people, when of course he doesn’t, when the unspoken weight of history-- theirs, whatever history, given Gawain’s age, Gawain might have had with his father-- pressing down on them.

“Bill Haydon’s son,” Gawain says, very late that night, when Kay has gone off to call an aunt, “Terribly boring but _oh_ how the Mater complains if I don’t,” and they are sitting in the dining room with a glass of port each.

“Yes,” Harry says, and he can tell now, he’ll be paying for that for the rest of his life, but hell, he’s been paying for it for most of his life already, so what’s the difference.

“You’re a better man than he was,” Gawain says, and Harry takes that for the compliment that it is.

 

Kay dies when Harry has been Galahad for two years. The funeral is held at St George’s, Hanover Square, and Gawain stands still and alone throughout it all, rejecting any attempts at comfort.

“Let him be,” says Arthur, leaning on his cane. “She was a damn fine woman.”

They sing _The Day Thou Gavest_ , and _I Vow To Thee My Country_ , and afterwards, they go back to the house, where Harry is put through the wringer by people who say, “Harry _Hart_?” by more people who recognise his face, or rather, Bill Haydon’s face.

One or two of them sidle up to Gawain, which is a foolish thing to do, because Gawain has been very purposefully not reacting to anything since he came out of the library where Arthur had taken him, since Kay came home in a coffin. Eventually, he comes over, and puts a hand on Harry’s arm, and says, with the sort of diction and clarity Harry can only envy, “Marina was so proud of you, my boy. So very proud.”

Harry can tell who in the crowd has heard of Kingsman and Bill Haydon both by who reacts to that. He covers Gawain’s hand with his own, in silent answer. Later that night, he and Myrddin put Gawain to bed, sodden with drink and misery, a misery Harry can’t even imagine, because first Gawain recruited Kay, and then he married her, and if all Harry can see are the gaps where she should be, how much worse for Gawain?

“You’ll stay,” Gawain says, just before Harry goes, hand surprisingly strong around Harry’s wrist, and Harry isn’t sure what he means, but he says, soothingly, “Of course I will.”

Ten years later, Harry is the only Kingsman left who remembers Arthur when he was Gawain, when he was a married man, when he wasn’t quite sure if he trusted Bill Haydon’s son, but did trust his wife’s judgement, and that means he is the only one who remembers that particular Kay, _his_ Kay, because none of those who follow will ever match up. He respects the man for that, and, even when Arthur is a reactionary old bastard, he loves him, and he stays.

He is Bill Haydon’s son, and he will not be a traitor.

**Author's Note:**

> Harry's experiences (or rather, his mother's) during the Iranian Revolution were shamelessly stolen from the author's father, though at least the Harts didn't go back for their carpet collection.
> 
> The title was taken from [When A Knight Won His Spurs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_a_Knight_Won_His_Spurs).
> 
> I have moved the events of TTSS back a little, please try not to think about it too hard.
> 
> I sincerely apologise for my terrible Italian.


End file.
